Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Mr. Stevens declared his innocence and his intention to fight the charges against him in a statement posted on his Web site. “I am innocent of these charges and intend to prove that,” he said.

Uh, Senator Stevens, are you saying you simply forgot to report that $250,000 in improvements to your home?

A federal grand jury in the District of Columbia charged Mr. Stevens, who is 84 and the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, with failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, including extensive renovations to his house in Alaska, a Land Rover and home furnishings on financial disclosure forms that he filed from 1999 to 2006.

I'm not going to be discriminatory and assume his mind is going just because he's got a few years, which I think means we have to assume this was a case of deliberate forgetfulness. Hey, I might buy the argument that he just doesn't even know why he did it. After all, this is the man that fought for the bridge to nowhere. I mean, maybe he's just so used to getting money that goes towards nothing he completely missed that it went to him and his house and just forgot about it.

Nah, seriously, this guy's got to go down. Sure, I know corruption is rampant in Congress...but seriously, is it not remarkable that during this administration we saw Republicans who were so corrupt even other Republicans couldn't ignore them? Ted Stevens gets indicted when we know the Department of Justice was hiring people based on their conservative leanings and firing non-partisans? I ask you, if the DOJ had been truly unaffected by this administration, how many more Republicans might be running for the hills?